Saddam, WMD and the Road to the 2003 Invasion
Saddam in the Twelve Years After Desert Storm
Between the 1991 ceasefire and the 2003 invasion, Saddam Hussein remained in power but operated under conditions no other state faced. UN sanctions, two coalition no-fly zones and an inspections regime were designed to contain his regime without removing it. Inside Iraq, repression deepened. The 1988 chemical-weapon attack on Halabja, in which roughly 5,000 Kurds were killed by Iraqi air-force sarin and mustard-gas bombs, was already on the international record. After 1991 Saddam crushed the Shia uprising in the south — mass graves uncovered after 2003 confirmed killings in the tens of thousands — and drained the southern marshes to displace the Marsh Arabs from a territory the regime could no longer police. The 1995 oil-for-food programme, intended to soften the impact of sanctions on civilians, was siphoned by the regime to reward loyalists.
Saddam’s record on which the 2003 invasion was justified was real: the 1988 Halabja chemical attack killed around 5,000 Kurds; the post-1991 suppression of the Shia uprising killed tens of thousands. UN Resolution 1441, passed unanimously in November 2002, gave him ‘a final opportunity to comply’ with disarmament obligations dating back to 1991.
Religious Divisions and the Question of Iraq
Iraq is a Shia-majority country — around 60% of the population — ruled until 2003 by a Sunni Arab elite drawn from Saddam’s home region around Tikrit. The Kurdish north (mostly Sunni but ethnically distinct) had operated as a semi-autonomous region under no-fly-zone protection since 1991. These divisions mattered for two reasons. They had shaped the brutality of the 1991 Shia and Kurdish uprisings, and they would shape the insurgency that followed the 2003 invasion. The Bush administration’s plans for post-Saddam Iraq assumed that the Shia majority and the Kurds would welcome liberation; they did. The plans paid less attention to what would happen to the displaced Sunni minority once the army and the Ba’ath party were dissolved.
After 9/11: Linking Saddam to al-Qaeda
From late 2001, senior figures in the Bush administration argued that Saddam might supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. Vice-President Dick Cheney repeatedly suggested that the lead 9/11 hijacker had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague. The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) and the Senate Intelligence Committee report (2006) both concluded there was no operational link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The two were ideologically opposed: Saddam ran a secular Ba’athist state, bin Laden a Sunni jihadist movement that considered Saddam’s regime apostate. Despite this, polling in 2003 showed around 70% of Americans believed Saddam was personally involved in 9/11. The link was a political construction, not an established fact.
In September 2002 Tony Blair’s government published ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government’, known popularly as the September Dossier. It carried a foreword by Blair claiming Saddam’s WMD capability was ‘active, detailed and growing’. Most controversially, the document repeated four times an intelligence claim that Iraqi forces could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order. The Hutton Inquiry (2004) and the Chilcot Inquiry (2016) both examined how the dossier was produced. Chilcot judged that the threat had been presented with ‘a certainty that was not justified’.
UNMOVIC, Blix and the Inspectors
UN Resolution 1441, passed unanimously by the Security Council on 8 November 2002, ordered Iraq to readmit weapons inspectors. The team that returned was led by the Swedish diplomat Hans Blix for the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Mohamed ElBaradei in charge of the nuclear file. Between November 2002 and March 2003 they conducted around 700 inspections at over 500 sites. Blix told the Security Council on 27 January 2003 that Iraq’s 12,000-page declaration was incomplete but that cooperation had improved; on 7 March he reported ‘tangible’ though gradual progress and asked for more time. ElBaradei told the same session that the documents behind claims that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger were forgeries. US Secretary of State Colin Powell had put the wider intelligence case to the Council on 5 February. The inspectors had not found WMD. They had not concluded that none existed. The Bush administration treated the absence of certainty as proof of concealment.
February 2003 and the Largest Anti-War Protests in History
On 15 February 2003, an estimated 6–10 million people took part in coordinated demonstrations across more than 600 cities, against the looming invasion. Around 1 million marched in London — the largest demonstration in British history at that time. The protests were notable for their breadth: trade unions, faith leaders, academics, anti-war veterans of the 1991 Gulf War and ordinary civilians who had not previously demonstrated. They did not change government policy. The British House of Commons voted in favour of military action on 18 March 2003 by 412 to 149, although 139 Labour MPs rebelled against their own Prime Minister. Failing to secure a second UN resolution explicitly authorising war — France made clear it would veto — the United States and the United Kingdom assembled what Washington called a ‘coalition of the willing’ outside the UN framework.
A common student error is to treat the WMD intelligence as either obviously correct or a deliberate lie. The Hutton Report (2004) and the Chilcot Report (2016) showed it was contested and selectively presented. Inspectors said no active programmes had been verified; intelligence agencies said small quantities probably existed; political leaders said the threat was clear, urgent and growing. The Iraq Survey Group, after the invasion, concluded that Iraq had ended its WMD programmes in the 1990s but kept the option of restarting them — the picture closest to what Blix had been describing all along.
The road to war ran through three formal moments and one non-event. UN Resolution 1441 (8 November 2002) gave Iraq a final opportunity to disarm. Hans Blix’s reports of January and March 2003 found no WMD but limited cooperation. The 15 February 2003 global protests were the largest in history. The non-event was the second UN resolution explicitly authorising force, which the United States and United Kingdom never secured.